Obama slammed over cancellation of health-insurance policies

Jack Torry, The Columbus Dispatch

Wednesday

Oct 30, 2013 at 12:01 AMOct 30, 2013 at 10:20 AM

WASHINGTON - Sounding a chorus of "we told you so," congressional Republicans yesterday assailed President Barack Obama following published reports that hundreds of thousands of Americans could have their individual insurance policies canceled because of the new health law.

WASHINGTON — Sounding a chorus of “we told you so,” congressional Republicans yesterday assailed President Barack Obama following published reports that hundreds of thousands of Americans could have their individual insurance policies canceled because of the new health law.

On Capitol Hill, House Speaker John Boehner, R-West Chester, told reporters he has “heard from hundreds of my constituents seeing their premiums rise, they’re seeing their policies being canceled.”

Rep. Jim Renacci, R-Wadsworth, said that Obama in 2009 “repeatedly claimed that if you like your health-care plan, you can keep it. He promised that if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. He told the American people with confidence that if you want lower insurance premiums, his law was for you.

“It is now apparent that the administration has known for the past three years that millions of Americans would lose their health-care plans under Obamacare, yet President Obama continued to re-sound his promise,” Renacci said.

The eruption on Capitol Hill was sparked by an NBC News report on Monday that the federal government has known for three years that at least 40 percent of the 14 million Americans who buy individual insurance policies will have them canceled because the policies do not meet the minimum standards established by the 2010 law known as Obamacare.

White House spokesman Jay Carney acknowledged on Monday that “it’s true that there are existing health-care plans on the individual market that don’t meet those minimum standards and therefore do not qualify.”

But Carney argued that Americans buying individual plans “will now have numerous options available to them, and 6 out of 10 will pay less than $100 per month in premiums for better insurance.”

At a House Ways and Means Committee hearing, Marilyn Tavenner, administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, apologized for the shaky rollout this month of the health law in which thousands of people could not enroll for insurance on the federal website.

Tavenner said that “nearly 700,000 applications have been submitted to the federal and state marketplaces.”

But she repeatedly refused to say how many of those people had actually enrolled in health insurance plans since the federal and state exchanges opened on Oct. 1.

“That number will not be available until mid-November,” Tavenner said. “We expect the initial number to be small.”

The difficulty continued last night: The data hub linked to the website was “experiencing an outage” last night. It was the second such outage in three days.

The data hub operator, Verizon, said it was doing maintenance on the system and expected it to be finished overnight.

A similar outage on Sunday halted online enrollment on the federal Healthcare.gov website as well as similar state sites.

Tavenner said insurers are responsible for cancellation letters now reaching many of the estimated 14 million people who buy individual policies. And, officials said, people who get cancellation notices can find better replacement plans.

Committee Republicans were not satisfied. Rep. Pat Tiberi, R-Genoa Township, said lawmakers are hearing “from our constituents that there is a disaster of a rollout that is occurring — not a hiccup — but a disaster of a rollout that is occurring.’’

Independent organizations allied with Obama also struck back against Republicans. Americans United for Change denounced Tiberi and Renacci — both members of the House Ways and Means Committee — charging that they “have zero credibility complaining about implementation glitches when they opposed” the new law from the beginning.

Information from The New York Times, the Associated Press and Reuters was included in this story.

jtorry@dispatch.com

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.